Tomorrow, Sunday, May 21, 2023, at 4 p.m. local time, the city of Kyle, Texas, will host a gathering of Kyles in Kyle Park in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people with the same first name.
As happened before when an event regarding the name “Kyle” swept the news cycle, the nation’s Kyles convened in groups of 99 via Zoom to determine how we felt as a group about the news-causing event. The online convention was attended by over 90,000 Kyles from around the country, including just under a hundred ex-patriated Americans who go by the name Kyle.
Because this was our second online convention, we were able to dispense with preliminary discussions about how the process would work, and each group agreed from the outset that the representatives we elected at our previous convention would remain in place.
Humbly, this decision made me the de facto spokesperson for the nation’s Kyles. I did not and do not take this role lightly. I understand that my rëelection does not mean that the way I feel about a particular issue is the way all Kyles feel about that issue; instead, it means they trust me to craft the opinion of the majority of Kyles, regardless of how I feel.
With that being said, I offer the following statement regarding the gathering of Kyles in Kyle, Texas, on behalf of the nation’s Kyles:
In 2021, the state of Texas prohibited the right of child-bearing persons to have an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. It also created a civil enforcement measure that allows any non-governmental employee to sue any other person involved in providing or intending to provide an abortion, including those who pay for the abortion. It also banned abortion-inducing medicine from the state, forbidding its delivery by mail, delivery service, or courier.
Between July 2021 and June 2022, school administrators in Texas banned over 800 books from their schools, making it the most censorious state in the nation. Between July and December 2023, Texas added another 438 instances of public school districts removing books from libraries and classrooms. The wave of book bans have caused entire classrooms and school libraries to suspend access to all of the books on their shelves in order to evade potential lawsuits.
Earlier this week, the governor of Texas announced he would sign Senate Bill 14 into law, which will prevent transgender youth from receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapies and undergoing gender-affirming surgeries (which are rare among children). Puberty blockers and hormone therapies are critical tools for improving the mental health of transgender children and stemming the high suicide rates among transgender individuals.
(Speaking for myself and as a teacher of several transgender students, I know that the loss of such medical care would likely cause more than one of my students to descend into irrecoverable depression and eventually result in a suicide attempt.)
Further, the governor of Texas has directed the Texas Department of Family Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender youth, categorizing any attempt at providing transgender-affirming care for their child as “child abuse.” While courts have prevented the state from investigating specific families, it has not issued a universal ban on the state’s policy. Schools have pulled trans students from their classrooms to be interrogated about their medical care. Teachers, who are mandated reporters, are required to report to the state any knowledge they have of families who allow their children to live in a manner counter to the gender inscribed on their birth certificate.
During the 2023 legislative session and its special sessions, Texas legislators put forward 76 bills that targeted the LGBTQ+ community. These bills called for:
- allowing Texas residents to file civil lawsuits against anyone who helped another Texas resident receive gender-affirming care, including out-of-state residents
- removing the statute of limitations for malpractice claims related to gender-affirming care, allowing people to file a malpractice case against any doctor who provided such care to any person before the person’s 25th birthday
- banning gender-affirming care for adults
- making it a state felony to attempt to conduct surveys and studies related to Texas’s LGBTQ+ youth population
- banning classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to 12th grade
- forcing schools to disclose to parents any request from students to be identified as other than the gender on their birth certificates, as well as any exhibition of behavior for the purpose of exploring their gender identity
- banning extracurricular clubs, activities, celebrations, or discussions related to sexual orientation or gender
- banning all books a school district deems as obscene, and then registering the vendor of said books and banning all schools in the entire state from purchasing books from that vendor
- requiring schools to enforce a separation of bathroom use based on “biological sex,” authorizing a civil penalty of up to $100,000 against the school for lawsuits related to a violation of the requirement
- prohibiting teachers and other school employees from affirming a trans or nonbinary student’s gender in any way, including through the use of a student’s preferred pronouns
- banning trans youth from participating in all sports as well as any school-based competition
- restricting the state from developing forms that include anything other than “male” and “female” as an option for someone’s sex
- defining any business that hosts performers exhibiting a gender identity different from the performer’s birth, including makeup or clothing, as a sexually oriented business in the eyes of the law
- revoking state funding from municipal libraries that host an all-ages drag storytime
- requiring birth certificates to mark down the biological sex of an infant defined exclusively by the presence of a Y chromosome
In 2021, Texas began preventing teachers from talking about “a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs” without giving deference to all sides, regardless of the ignorance that may fuel one or more of those sides.
As part of the same law — which attempts to target “critical race theory” as understood by ignorant Texas politicians — the state also prevents students from critically considering whether slavery and racism “are anything other than deviations from, betrayals or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States” (ignorant, of course, because slavery was baked into the founding document of the United States and was only outlawed through President Lincoln’s objectively unconstitutional Emancipation Proclamation, which itself was only issued as a war-saving measure, and whose civil-rights legacy continues to be opposed by Lincoln’s Republican party, opposition whose modern form was inspired by the Supreme Court’s decision to ban legalized racial segregation in Brown vs. the Board of Education).
Of course, Texas would not be Texas if it limited its hate to women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and Blacks.
This session, the state legislature is considering a bill, H. 20, which would enact anti-immigration measures in opposition to Federal authority. It would compel the state to create a Border Protection Unit whose officers can arrest, detain, or deter individuals crossing Texas’s southern border using non-deadly force. It would also give those officers immunity from criminal or civil liability. The bill attempts to supersede the Federal government’s exclusive power over immigration by deputizing the state’s citizens as anti-immigrant vigilantes. It would require, de facto if not de jure, that all brown-skinned Texans living along the border carry their identification papers with them at all times or risk the effects of arrest, detention, and “non-deadly” violence.
Adding to its parade of hatred and condemnation, Texas has challenged the Indian Child Welfare Act in the Supreme Court. The act was passed by Congress in 1978 to atone for the United States’s disgusting history of removing Indigenous children from their cultural communities. It establishes a preference for placing any Native American child who has to be removed from their home with another Native family, ideally an extended family member, but if one is not available, with a member of the same tribe, and if that is not available, with a member of any tribe.
If Texas has its way (which it may at least in part, given the Suprem Court’s statements and questions during the oral argument in November), Native children may once again be stolen from their families and cultural communities, adding even more tragedy to our nation’s continuing genocide against the continent’s indigenous peoples.
While the Kyles of the United States welcome the attempt to assemble the world’s largest gathering of individuals with the same name, we cannot stand idly by while Texas threatens by law and by body the rights and privileges of the state’s women and minorities. If we were to venture to Kyle, Texas, this weekend, we would bring with us hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of economic activity, thereby giving tacit consent to Texas’ hatred.
This we will not do.
And so, on behalf of the nation’s Kyles, I have the honor of saying:
Fuck Texas.